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Four Years in a Shed
To show polonium and radium to the incredulous, to prove to the world
the existence of their "children", and to complete their own conviction,
Pierre and Marie Curie were now to labour for four years.
During the first year they busied themselves with the chemical separation
of radium and polonium and they studied the radiation of the products,
more and more active, thus obtained. Before long they considered it more
practical to separate their efforts. Pierre Curie tried to determine the properties of radium, and to know the new metal better. Marie continued those
chemical treatments which would permit her to obtain salts of pure radium.
In this division of labour Marie had chosen the
"man's job". She accomplished the toil of a day labourer. Inside the shed her husband was
absorbed by delicate experiments. In the courtyard, dressed in her old
dust-covered and acid-stained smock, her hair blown by the wind, surrounded by smoke which stung her eyes and throat, Marie was a sort of
factory all by herself.
The days of work became months and years: Pierre and Marie were not
discouraged. This material which resisted them, which defended its secrets,
fascinated them. United by their tenderness, united by their intellectual
passions, they had, in a wooden shack, the "anti-natural" existence for
which they had both been made, she as well as he.
Marie continued to treat, kilogramme by kilogramme, the tonnes of
pitchblende residue which were sent her on several occasions from St.
Joachimsthal. With her terrible patience, she was able to be. every day for
four years, a physicist, a chemist, a specialized worker, an engineer and a
labouring man all at once. Thanks to her brain and muscle, the old tables in the
shed held more and more concentrated products --
products more and more rich in radium. Marie Curie was
approaching the end: she no longer stood in the
courtyard, enveloped in bitter smoke, to watch the heavy
basins of material in fusion. She was now at the stage
of purification and of the "fractional crystallization"
of strongly radioactive solutions. But the poverty of
her haphazard equipment hindered her work more than
ever. It was now that she needed a spotlessly clean
work-room and apparatus perfectly protected against
cold, heat and dirt. In this shed, open to every wind,
iron and coal dust was afloat which, to Marie's despair,
mixed itself into the products purified with so much
care. Her heart sometimes constricted before these little daily accidents, which took so much of her time
and her strength.
Pierre was so tired of the interminable struggle that
he would have been quite ready to abandon it. Of course,
he did not dream of dropping the study of radium and of
radioactivity. But he would willingly have renounced, for the time being, the special operation of preparing pure radium.
The obstacles seemed insurmountable. Could they not resume this work
later on, under better conditions ? More attached to the meaning of natural
phenomena than to their material reality, Pierre Curie was exasperated to
see the paltry results to which Marie's exhausting effort had led.
He advised
an armistice.
He counted without his wife's character. Marie wanted to isolate radium
and she would isolate it. She scorned fatigue and difficulties, and even the
gaps in her own knowledge which complicated her task. After all, she was
only a very young scientist: she still had not the certainty and great culture
Pierre had acquired by twenty years' work, and sometimes she stumbled
across phenomena or methods of calculation of which she knew very little.
and for which she had to make hasty studies. So much the worse! With stubborn eyes under her great brow, she clung to her apparatus and her
test-tubes.
In 1902, forty-five months after the day on which the Curies announced
the probable existence of radium, Marie finally carried off
the victory in
this war of attrition: she succeeded in preparing a decigramme of pure
radium, and made a first determination of the atomic weight of the new
substance, which was 225. The incredulous chemists -- of whom there
were still a few -- could only bow before the facts, before the superhuman
obstinacy of a woman. Radium officially existed.
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